About Converged and Hyper Converged Infrastructure

vCenter

Recently, I have come across an issue with the PSC’s not joining to the domain (They disconnected from the domain automatically) after upgrading the vCenter components (PSC01, PSC02 and vCenter windows server) from 6.0 Update 2 build 3634791 to 6.0 Update 2a build 4632154 or to 6.0 Update 3b build 5326079. This issue occurred as the windows domain controller was 2012 R2 and SMB 2 was the communication protocol to the domain controller. we have to enable SMB 2 on the PSC’s for them to communicate to the domain after the Upgrade.

The above website clearly mentions on how to use the SUSE Linux Rescue CD to create a new root password and update it in the /etc/shadow file on the PSC itself and after reboot you will be able to get into the PSC with the new password.

Recently I had to restart the web-client service in vcsa 6.0 U1 appliance and found out that the web client service is called differently than in the windows vCenter. the web client service in the vcsa is called vSphere-client

here are the commands to start, stop and restart any services in the vcsa appliance.

To restart a vCenter Server and/or Platform Services Controller service using the command-line:
Log in as root through an SSH or console session on the vCenter Server Appliance.
Run this command to enable the shell:

I was pretty surprised to see that there are very few posts on the internet detailing the process of upgrading vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.0 with an External PSC. so here is my recent experience on how I did it

Environment:

vCenter server 5.5 (Windows)

vCenter SSO 5.5 (Windows)

SQL Server 2012 (Windows)

Take snapshots of the vCenter server, vCenter SSO server and SQL server

take a backup of the vCenter database in the SQL server

mount the “VMware-VIMSetup-all-6.0.0-2562643.iso” to the Windows vCenter SSO 5.5 server

Go ahead and run the autorun program and run the vCenter setup program

The program will automatically detect the SSO 5.5 in the server and let you know that it will be upgraded to PSC 6.0

Click next to continue to go ahead and upgrade the SSO 5.5 to PSC 6.0

This will complete the upgrade process of SSO 5.5 to PSC 6.0

Once this process is complete, we can go ahead and upgrade the vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.0 as the SSO 5.5 is upgraded to PSC 6.0

This concludes the way in which we can upgrade the vCenter 5.5 to 6.0 using external PSC if there is already an SSO 5.5 server available in the environment.